Electric hair cutting appliances are generally known and include trimmers, clippers and shavers whether powered by main supplied electricity or batteries. Such devices are generally used to trim body hair, in particular facial and head hair to allow a person to have a well-groomed appearance.
Conventional hair cutting devices comprise a main body forming an elongated housing having a front or cutting end and an opposite handle end. A cutting assembly is disposed at the cutting end. Most of the cutting blade assemblies known in the art comprise a stationary blade element and a moveable blade element which moves in a reciprocal, translatory manner relative to the stationary blade element. The cutting blade assembly itself extends from the cutting end and is usually fixed in a single position relative to the main body of the hair clipper, such that the orientation of the cutting blade assembly is determined by a user orientating the main body of the device.
Hair clippers of the kind mentioned above are usually used to trim beards and therefore have a rather large cutting blade assembly with large blade elements. Such a device is, for example, known from U.S. Pat. No. 5,367,772 A. As an additional feature, this device allows an adjustment of the position of the moveable cutting blade with respect to the stationary cutting blade in order to selectively adapt the distance between these blades to accomplish a plurality of different hair cut lengths by using one and the same device. However, the type of trimmers known from U.S. Pat. No. 5,367,772 A are only suited for trimming large and rough hair contours, such as for trimming the whole beard or parts of the head hair. Due to their large cutting blade assemblies, fine details are really difficult to cut with these kind of hair trimmers.
Other types of hair trimmers also exist that allow to cut fine details into the hair or to allow hair cutting at very sensitive or tiny body locations such as in the nostrils or in the ears. A hair trimming device of this type is, for example, known from WO 98/18604 A. However, such a trimmer would not be useful to cut fine and fancy-shaped contours into a beard as this is nowadays becoming more and more fashionable. Very tiny trimmers with tiny cutting blade assemblies, as they are also known in the art, can be used to cut such fancy and fine details into the beard. An example of this type of hair trimmer is known from US 2012/0110855 A1. It relates to a hair trimmer that is capable of making delicate and precise cuts and designs in ones hair. A small razor pad is used that is capable of getting into tight complicated areas of the face easier. As the trimmer has more agility to move around curves and indentations on the face, parts of the beard, mustache and the hair around the ear can be kept intact. On the other hand, this device is certainly not useful to cut large and rough contours in a fast and comfortable way, since every tremble of the user's hand will result in a non-straight contour.
This means for the user that he/she needs to have several different types of hair trimmers, for each kind of body hair and each type of contour he/she wants to cut. It is evident that this problem of having to choose between different types of trimmer elements or even between different types of trimmers and shavers (small and coarse trimmers) is not comfortable for a user.